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my site, ConcertHotels.com experienced a significant dip in traffic (30%+) due to Penguin 2.0 - so much so that it's actually made SearchMetric's Penguin 2.0 biggest losers list, sitting proudly alongside a load of porn sites!!! It's definitely frustrating because I've been a keen follower of SEOmoz over the last few years and I've tried to design my website with SEO in mind, but also with a focus on providing my user's with relevant content. I do believe that in my niche (help users find hotels close to concert venues), ConcertHotels.com is one of the best sites out there - we provide accurate distances and directions from hotels to venue (many of our competitors don't offer this, providing only straight line distances), and we've collected thousands of venue and hotel reviews from genuine customers. Our previous design of the website was such that many pages were quite thin on content (since we had 5 pages associated with each concert venue - an overview page, nearby hotels page, upcoming events page, reviews page and nearby restaurants page), and because of this, the site was huge and more difficult to crawl. But strangely, that design, which is currently live on my UK site (concerthotels.co.uk), has managed to survive Penguin 2.0 unscathed. My new design, which was launched in April 2013, and is live on ConcertHotels.com, merged a lot of the content so that venue's now have only two pages - an overview page and a nearby hotels page. This has resulted in pages with much more unique, relevant content, a faster site, and a site that should be easier for Google to crawl. But this new design has resulted in a 30% drop.

Regarding links, we don't have a huge number of external sites linking in to ConcertHotels.com, but over the last couple of years the sole focus has been on encouraging venue's own sites to link to use - so only very relevant sites have been linking to us (as far as I'm aware).

So, for someone who has tried his best to adopt good SEO practices, at the same time as trying to generate unique content for the website, seeing such a damaging drop in Google's ranking is extremely frustrating. :(

While the SEO link directory list is extremely useful, please be careful. I submitted links to two web directories listed on SEOmoz at the start of this month, Dmegs, and My Green Corner - I requested featured links for both, which should have been reviewed within 24 hours, but while both payments have been taken from my PayPal account, no links have yet appeared on either site, and I'm yet to receive a response from any emails I've sent to them.

Still trying to decide whether or not to book a last minute ticket to the London event on Friday, but I haven't been able to connect to the Distilled website all day today - are you aware of technical issues?